[Freedombox-discuss] WebUI

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 03:37:57AM +0200, paxcoder wrote:
>I was wondering, to what degree do you guys want the Web UI to be new? 
>We could start from scratch, but perhaps it'd be better to first use 
>existing web Ui's like Webmin or torrent client's own, and then slowly 
>replace one by one by our own stuff.

That's a good one!

In my opinion FreedomBox should be a Pure Debian Blend.  This means all 
parts of it should be Debian parts.

If some we need something not currently in (unstable branch of) Debian, 
then we should either package it oourselves or (preferrably) encourage 
existing Debian packaging teams to package it.

That "convincing" may be as simple as filing RFP bugreports, locating a 
relevant team, and tell this team how marvellous it would be for Debian 
if they packaged our RFPs.  Or it could be that some of us rolled up 
their sleeves and got involved in those teams to package.

Sure, we can act as a packaging team ourselves, too.  But that is 
wasteful IMO.

Sure, we can skip packaging and instead throw our "spice" on top of a 
Debian Blend like any sysadmin would do.  This is deadly simple in 
comparison, but a disaster both to maintain (we really are *not* 
sysadmins here, but (re)distributors!) and to develop (e.g. too few 
eyeballs to make all our bugs shallow, when we only eat our own dog food 
without sharing it with the rest of the world!).


>If we do that at first, we'll definitely have a usable box soon. We can 
>worry about its looks later. Cause, tbh what we're doing - unifying the 
>"experience" (using Job's terms) - isn't unix-like. I doubt we can 
>create something better than Webmin at what it does. We can create 
>something easier and better looking though. But that would imply that 
>for real config you'd ssh into the box. I don't think that was the 
>idea.

Webmin was once part of Debian but was dropped 5 years ago.  The 
packaging contained some security flaw (shipping a private SSL cert with 
the package instead of generating anew at install time, I believe) 
causing a loss in popularity, but the real reason for dropping it was 
lack of interest in maintaining the packaging (due to unusual coding 
style, I believe).  See here: http://bugs.debian.org/343897

Do anyone volunteer to maintain Webmin packaging for Debian, or convince 
some Debian team to do so?

Of web-based service administration packages currently in Debian, I only 
know of GoSA. Skolelinux is currently considering to use that.  GoSA 
does *not* manage configfiles, however, but LDAP trees.  Or at least 
that is how I understand it.

I strongly recommend to get Ægir and any other tool relevant for 
FreedomBox packaged officially for Debian!


Kind regards,

  - Jonas

-- 
  * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
  * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/attachments/20100916/d2c5570f/attachment.pgp>